Friday, March 23, 2012

Many of you may have heard of the new Paper Mate InkJoy. As indicated in the written review, there has been a lot of marketing for this new offering, and I was quite excited to find it in one of the local Big Box stores.

As you can see, I did not love this one at all. Side note: I always thought 'Paper Mate' was 'Papermate', as one word, but I was wrong, so please disregard the fact that I wrote it as a single word. I am still not sure why there are two hearts between 'Paper' and 'Mate', but maybe someone else has some insight on this?

The performance of the InkJoy is just average - you could do worse than the InkJoy, but all of the hype and marketing about the InkJoy seems silly once you try it. The Paper Mate InkJoy site claims "revolutionary ink", "the best in effortless writing", and "crisp, clean lines every time." None of this is remotely true, not even close.

The clip, as usual from Paper Mate, is sparse. We just have the two aforementioned hearts. The clip was adequate, but the push-button mechanism feels about as cheap as they come.

The grip, barrel, and overall shape of the pen all feel comfortable. I can say that the InkJoy feels comfortable in the hand, but that is the best feature of the pen. In terms of performance, this pen *is* called the InkJoy, rather than the ErgoJoy, GripJoy, or BarrelJoy, so I had higher hopes for the ink itself.

You can't really see it here, but the 1.0 ball tends to glob quite a bit, which is one of the major complaints about oil-based ballpoint pen ink.

I have yet to try a Chinese-made pen that outperforms a Japanese, German, or U.S.-made pen, and that trend is reflected here, too. With all of the other 'super-smooth' ballpoints to come out in recent years, I see no reason to purchase an InkJoy.

If anyone else has reviewed the InkJoy, feel free to include a link to your review in the comments section.

Don't forget, the April Carnival of Pen, Pencil & Paper is almost here. Feel free to e-mail submissions to your reviews, or any other pen/paper/ink reviews, via e-mail (the electronic submission form is not working very well right now). I look forward to seeing what everyone sends in!

Monday, March 19, 2012

I apologize for the lack of posts as of late. I was quite sick for three weeks, but I recovered just in time for a vacation to Hawaii, which was excellent.

I will have some new posts up soon, but I wanted to remind everyone that the April Carnival of Pen, Pencil & Paper is just around the corner. In trying to access the submission form myself, it seems like the blogcarnival.com site may be down.

You're more than welcome to send submissions to me via e-mail or Twitter.